
On the occasion of my lecture (with the above title) at the Design Museum of Barcelona, during the Victor Papanek exhibition, I was interviewed about relational design, the potential for social and ecological transformation, and the mixed blessings of terms such as ‘future’ or ‘resilience’
Q: You define yourself as a bioregional designer. What does this mean?
JT: During my professional career, I’ve been trying to understand why all the arguments about the damage we’re doing to the planet have never stuck. What I’ve understood is that we had been having discussions in a very abstract sense about words such as ‘sustainability’, which don’t necessarily touch us in our daily lives. There’s a metabolic gap between the natural and the man-made world. Because of this split, we’ve been able to carry on being told the world is in sick condition, but not really feeling it was our responsibility. This is where the subject of a bioregion comes in. Place has a power to connect people to the reality of the situation and to provide a context for networking with people that we would otherwise disagree with. Bioregion is an alternative to all those abstract words, I use it to provoke people to ask “How can we make our place healthier, and have a better future?”.
Q: Your last book, How to Thrive in the Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow’s World Today, looks into a future economic scenario. What is the role of design?
JT: It is diverse, but has a certain common thread: design is more about relationships between people than it is about products. The kind of practice present in all those projects is how
The City as a Living System: A Design Research Agenda
This is the text of my plenary talk at the Design x Collaborative Cities conference, 28 and 29 October 2018, Shanghai. It was hosted by the College of Design and Innovation (D&I) at Tongji University, where I am a visiting professor, and DESIS Network. (Here is the 25 minute video).
The industrial age distracted us from a whole-systems understanding of the world.
Paving over the soil, and filling our lives with media, obscured our interdependency with living systems.
The creation of cities that are habitable for all of life, not just human life, will determine the future relevance of design research.
We must learn to think of the places where we live as ecosystems, not as machines.
We need to embrace biodiversity, and local economic activity, as better measures of a city’s health than the amount of money that flows through it.
And we need to foster new connections between people, and place, to bring new opportunities to life.
Place. Care. Value.
A design research agenda along these lines is already taking shape.
The practices of ecological urbanism, or civic ecology, study how to help living organisms, and their environment, thrive together. They enrich city design with the insights of ecology, botany, climatology, hydrology, geology, and geography.
This ecological approach is not preoccupied by the the concepts of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ .
On the contrary, it involves